Coffee
by Disco-Sadistic
Summary: Lily Evans can't see what her mother ever saw in her dull, steady father until she, too, finds herself in love with a dependable sort of man. L/J fluff. Very minor adult themes.


**A/N: **I promise I haven't abandoned LtD … I've just run into more plot complications than I was prepared to deal with. It's coming along. In the meantime, have some fluff from a completely different fandom! (It might be the only time you get any real fluff from me, so enjoy it.)

It is a credit to Mr. and Mrs. Evans's parenting that their youngest daughter never notices a single fracture in their relationship until they are dead and gone. Mrs. Evans was charming, vivacious, a brilliant hostess of regular bridge games, if not particularly adept at housework. Mr. Evans was steadfast, loving, but uncomfortable with strangers and particularly awkward in formal wear. They didn't seem like opposites to Lily, not really. They were simply the way parents ought to be.

When they die, Petunia pairs one of their wedding photos with the announcement in the papers and Lily realizes they weren't always the way she remembers them. Before she was a mother or a wife, Veronica Gordon was a tall, willowy beauty with great, round eyes and bold, white teeth. Her wedding party sparkled with all the inherited wealth she abandoned for love of a stout man in a borrowed suit. Lily can see that they loved each other, even then. It is evident in the secrecy of their smiles, as though they were getting away with something, even at the altar.

And, Lily thinks, looking at the iron-hard set of her grandparents' lips, all four of them identical, maybe they were.

That is a kind of love that Lily can understand. She herself has a taste for the strange, the new, the forbidden—which is why the photo unsettles her so much. It isn't what her parents ever saw in each other that troubles her now. It's why they stayed together so long when they were so obviously an ill-suited match—when her father was so obviously not a 'bad boy,' just a bad fit. She can't help but remember the speckled brown carpeting of her childhood home, the way the roof over the attic had a tendency to leak, and wonder if her mother ever dreamed of being swept away by a man who would do more than just make her coffee in the morning.

Then, quite unexpectedly, Lily finds herself in love with a man who makes her coffee in the morning.

Of course, that isn't all James does. He also sets the porridge to heating before he goes out for his morning run and drags her out of bed if she isn't up by the time he gets back. He makes himself tea and puts another anti-leaking charm on the roof and asks if she's quite certain about this particular cottage. (She is.)

And he does it all without complaining, mostly, because he loves her, and because he's naturally a morning person, and because nothing would ever get done before noon if it were up to her and Remus. She envies his ability to rise with the sun but she herself never feels more awake than when everyone else is about to turn in.

"It's all that studying you did back in Hogwarts," he says. He says a few months out of school ought to cure her, but they don't. Six months after graduation he still comes home from Order missions at four in the morning to find her reading in the parlor.

"I told you not to wait up for me," he says then.

"I didn't," she says. What she really wants to say, of course, is that she couldn't have slept even if she wanted to, not knowing that he was out fighting Death Eater with Sirius. Sirius Black, of all people. Because of course the two of them can anticipate each other's moves better than any other pair except for the Prewitt twins, so of course they're teamed up, but that doesn't mean she has to like it.

He knows this, of course, knows her. But what he says is, "It's all those years of studying—utterly ruined you."

"I suppose you ought to toss me out with the rubbish, then."

"Ought to," he agrees. "Come along to bed, won't you?"

Lily knows—or, at least, she's heard stories about what fighting does to a man. Marlene always comes to lunch with half a dozen hickeys on her neck the day after her bloke gets back from a mission. Alice says she can't even make it out of bed for food when hers returns—but then Lily isn't entirely certain that's all Frank's fault.

When James pries her book from her hands she knows that isn't what he's thinking of. She knows there'll be a kiss, maybe a long glance at her bare legs as they undress, and the weight of him in bed beside her as she drifts off to sleep, but no more.

And in the morning there'll be coffee, and it will be enough.


End file.
